Zellis Customer Story

Before Cuvama

“We felt like we had the right people, we had the right product, we had the right market share. It was really the conversations – they were very feature, function and product-centric and didn’t get to the heart of what the customer wanted to achieve.”
– Tom Canning, CCO at Zellis

Over the years, Zellis had tried a number of selling methods and tools based on the value and outcomes the customer would receive from the company’s solutions. Zellis believes that the key to selling value and outcomes (and not features and functions), starts with executing a detailed discovery and understanding the individual customer needs and wants.

The challenge was not simply how to quantify ROI. Instead, Zellis wanted all salespeople to be able to consistently communicate a personalised value proposition for each sales opportunity.

Before Cuvama, the Zellis team had value selling training and had deployed an Excel-based ROI calculator. But they were still not seeing the adoption and intended results they were looking for.

“Most tools we looked at on the market solved the problem of the complexity of Excel and the look of it, but nothing else. They wouldn’t solve the problem of increasing our win rates, increasing our selling price, and speeding up the deals.”
– Tom Canning

After Cuvama

“The message that we heard loud and clear from Cuvama was that it is much more about the discovery and understanding the customer than it is about the output you want to produce with any sales tool.”
– Tom Canning

The Cuvama Customer Value Management (CVM) platform takes Zellis’ value drivers and codifies them. This means that value drivers can be quickly and easily accessed by all salespeople and prospects, or customers during discovery.

This made it easy for Zellis salespeople to differentiate their solution. Cuvama also allowed them to collaborate on value and outcomes, which in turn helped them to guide buyer stakeholder consensus.

Zellis salespeople now start every sales conversation by collaborating with the customer to discover their business pain. They then identify the KPIs and expected impacts that will help overcome these pain points.

The Results

“Customers often say they’ve learnt a lot of things by Zellis taking them on this journey that they hadn’t anticipated and thought about. They feel confident that this is going to go all the way through to us delivering success for them.”
– Tom Canning

Cuvama has helped establish a culture of value and business outcomes across Zellis’ teams including; sales, implementation, customer success and product. In particular, sales performance has enjoyed some outstanding results in just seven months after implementing Cuvama:

• Increased win-rate. Win-rate has doubled
• Increased average selling price. ASP has increased 35%
• Increased deal size. Deal size is 43% higher than the broad sales team average

Additionally, greater visibility of customer engagement has resulted in higher deal predictability. Cuvama has also helped Zellis reduce the time needed to onboard new sales reps and make them productive.

What’s Next?

Although the impact that Cuvama has had on Zellis is already significant, the company is just getting started. Zellis is now deploying Cuvama more broadly to include its account management teams, other customer-facing functions and product management.

The company is also building a repository of data to help guide the business at a strategic level, including its product roadmap and sales strategy. New offerings and value propositions are also planned to be added to the Cuvama app.

“Cuvama helps us to go on that journey to becoming a customer-centric organisation—we’re trying to plug it into all areas of our business so we can do that.”
– Tom Canning

Recommendations to other Leadership Teams

Tom’s advice to other companies that are looking for a CVM tool is:

1 – Think about what you are trying to achieve as a business. If you don’t do this, you could just end up with a slightly better version of what you have now.

2 – Think about the journey your company is on and where you want to end up. Zellis has a long-term strategy to transform the culture of the company, including how it sells and deals with customers. For the team, Cuvama isn’t just a tool –  it’s a way of achieving these goals 

“With Cuvama, it was that shift to focus on discovery that was instrumental to us achieving great outcomes.”
– Tom Canning